Dewey Decimal System.

If Aristotle was around, he woulda loved the Dewey Decimal system. In fact, if he wasn’t such a humble fellow, he might take a bit of credit for it, as he is a folk hero to those who get excited about organizing and classifying information.

So…if you go into a library or Powell’s Books, and you’re looking for something, then here are two bits of valuable information:

Fiction

Look for it under the author’s last name. So if you’re looking for Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, you will not look under S for Something, or W for Wicked, or R for Ray…

…you’ll look under B for Bradbury.

Non-fiction

The issue of categorizing an entire universe of books by what it’s not is a conversation to saved for another hour. Why must everything not fiction be described as “not-fiction”? Again, another conversation.

Thanks to the Dewey Decimal System, we have a wonderful way of doing two things. The second of these two things is especially great:

One, you can find the general topic you’re looking for by the number. For example, books concerning the Social Sciences will be found in the 400s.

Two, you can simply go to a subject area and get lost for a couple hours as you peruse all the titles in the 100s, which includes Philosophy and Psychology.

The System

000 Computer science, information, general work

100 Philosophy and psychology

200 Religion

300 Social Sciences

400 Language

500 Science

600 Technology

700 Art & recreation

800 Literature

900 History & Geography

That’s the simple Dewey!

Each of the titles under each of these three-digit numbers if further broken down more specifically by numbers after the decimal point. So, books in the Social Sciences might have numbers like 800.412, 844.46 or 873.679 LON.

The last one with the LON is a further delineation of the author’s last name. At this point, they’re organized numerically and then alphabetically. So if Ray Bradbury and I had both written non-fiction books about Language (400s), then they might be categorized as follows:

414.367 BRA
then
414.367 LON

And there you go. Dewey Decimal system. I’m a proud library geek and still love it. Thank you, Melvil Dewey!